I don't think that consumers seek Android phones nearly as much as they seek out iPhones, but we've long since passed the point where Apple fans can simply hand-wave Android away.

Really? what fraction of Android sales do you think are becuase they wanted Android? 1/3?

No idea. Apple has created a strong brand identity with the iPhone. They use iPhone advertisements to tell users how iPhone features make their lives better. Like the iCloud ad showing photos and other content syncing between Apple devices, or the various Siri ads that tell a story about how this new natural voice interface makes using the phone in day-to-day life easier. People see those ads and seek out the iPhone in order to get those experiences.

Android is this amorphous thing that isn't really marketed at all. The various OEMs market their phones and the carriers market their networks, but they aren't really telling a story about how Android is enabling the great experiences that Apple promotes with the iPhone. So what I'm getting at is that while Samsung has seen fantastic success with their Android line, it's not because Android is the selling feature. Even their most recent advertisements have focused on how Samsung phones can do all the great things iPhone can, and more. They haven't been about Android, they've been about Samsung phones.

So I think that, for many people, Android is just another feature check-box on a long list of checkboxes next to the phones they want. That's not a bad thing, it just speaks to the realities of the market. The iPhone is a known quantity to consumers. The Galaxy S2 is a known quantity. Android isn't. These people choose Samsung over Apple, not Android over iOS.

So by "taking off" you mean something like the Wright brothers first flights?

Taken off like Wikipedia circa 2001 or Linux circa 1991.

The problem is people go the OSM site, look at the bad UI, slow response and lack of street view and satellite and don't realize the meat is the street data. Sure it's just getting started now, but as more and more products leave GSM due to fees it can only get better.

That's some awesome handwaving there. Aside from THOSE things, it's fine! People like using services that have 5% of the functionality and data of the competition!

And I hate to break it to you, but the street data is crap. Your "meat" is a joke.

And newsflash, it's been around for 5 years. How long does it get to "get started"?

It's truly amazing the double standards on show here, open in Android is bad, but in something Apple is now using, it's good! Crap UI and slow response in Android is bad, but in this new thing Apple is using it's good! Free like Android is bad, but free for Apple is good! Google can't charge people for using their services, how dare they!

I work in the mapping field and I wish data like this was actually good, because we'd use it. It isn't, it's laughably bad. And doing it correctly takes stunning amounts of money, data and people.

I bet Apple rolls/buys their own and quickly moves away from OSM, they've certainly got the money for it.

OSM's data is spotty - there are wastelands where the data is shit. It also has areas where it has similar or better coverage than Google Maps. My hometown of Burlington Vermont is equally accurate on OSM as it is on Google Maps, and areas I travel in Africa have much better detail.

But the thing is, what's important about the mapping products isn't their website. I never ever visit Google Maps or OSM any more. I use my phone app which draws on the underlying data and pretties it up. Look at what Apple did with iPhoto for an example of how OSM data can be made to look good.

And why would Apple roll their own when they could just as easily kickstart OSM and then wash their hands of it. The underlying maps are never going to be a profit center for apple - the profit center will be differentiating how they manipulate and present the data, and any real-time data they can offer on top of the maps.

It's in Apple's best interest to spend as little money as possible to ensure that the underlying maps are good and focus all their energy on the layer above that. Ditto foursquare. Ditto MS. That means a consortium of players contributing resources (sat photos, processing cycles, etc.) to an open map-building process.

Primarily because "smart" is a word that doesn't denote anything much in this context, but connotes high-endianness that these phones do not possess.

Huh? That makes no sense. "smart" means surfing, apps, etc. not if it is high-end or low-end. And really--those "low-end" phones are probably on par with the iPhone 3 or 3GS (admittedly wild speculation here, but should be about the right ballpark).

I don't think that consumers seek Android phones nearly as much as they seek out iPhones, but we've long since passed the point where Apple fans can simply hand-wave Android away.

Really? what fraction of Android sales do you think are becuase they wanted Android? 1/3?

No idea. Apple has created a strong brand identity with the iPhone. They use iPhone advertisements to tell users how iPhone features make their lives better. Like the iCloud ad showing photos and other content syncing between Apple devices, or the various Siri ads that tell a story about how this new natural voice interface makes using the phone in day-to-day life easier. People see those ads and seek out the iPhone in order to get those experiences.

Android is this amorphous thing that isn't really marketed at all. The various OEMs market their phones and the carriers market their networks, but they aren't really telling a story about how Android is enabling the great experiences that Apple promotes with the iPhone. So what I'm getting at is that while Samsung has seen fantastic success with their Android line, it's not because Android is the selling feature. Even their most recent advertisements have focused on how Samsung phones can do all the great things iPhone can, and more. They haven't been about Android, they've been about Samsung phones.

So I think that, for many people, Android is just another feature check-box on a long list of checkboxes next to the phones they want. That's not a bad thing, it just speaks to the realities of the market. The iPhone is a known quantity to consumers. The Galaxy S2 is a known quantity. Android isn't. These people choose Samsung over Apple, not Android over iOS.

This sounds pretty weak, imo. I see tons of those little robots around. I hear Andriod and "droid". It sounds an aweful lot like trying to diminish Android. Much like people tried to say that people didn't "pick" Windows. So if the iPhone is such a known thing--maybe people aren't picking Android, just knwo that they don't want an iPhone.

So by "taking off" you mean something like the Wright brothers first flights?

Taken off like Wikipedia circa 2001 or Linux circa 1991.

The problem is people go the OSM site, look at the bad UI, slow response and lack of street view and satellite and don't realize the meat is the street data. Sure it's just getting started now, but as more and more products leave GSM due to fees it can only get better.

That's some awesome handwaving there. Aside from THOSE things, it's fine! People like using services that have 5% of the functionality and data of the competition!

And I hate to break it to you, but the street data is crap. Your "meat" is a joke.

And newsflash, it's been around for 5 years. How long does it get to "get started"?

It's truly amazing the double standards on show here, open in Android is bad, but in something Apple is now using, it's good! Crap UI and slow response in Android is bad, but in this new thing Apple is using it's good! Free like Android is bad, but free for Apple is good! Google can't charge people for using their services, how dare they!

I work in the mapping field and I wish data like this was actually good, because we'd use it. It isn't, it's laughably bad. And doing it correctly takes stunning amounts of money, data and people.

I bet Apple rolls/buys their own and quickly moves away from OSM, they've certainly got the money for it.

OSM's data is spotty - there are wastelands where the data is shit. It also has areas where it has similar or better coverage than Google Maps. My hometown of Burlington Vermont is equally accurate on OSM as it is on Google Maps, and areas I travel in Africa have much better detail.

But the thing is, what's important about the mapping products isn't their website. I never ever visit Google Maps or OSM any more. I use my phone app which draws on the underlying data and pretties it up. Look at what Apple did with iPhoto for an example of how OSM data can be made to look good.

And why would Apple roll their own when they could just as easily kickstart OSM and then wash their hands of it. The underlying maps are never going to be a profit center for apple - the profit center will be differentiating how they manipulate and present the data, and any real-time data they can offer on top of the maps.

It's in Apple's best interest to spend as little money as possible to ensure that the underlying maps are good and focus all their energy on the layer above that. Ditto foursquare. Ditto MS. That means a consortium of players contributing resources (sat photos, processing cycles, etc.) to an open map-building process.

And if they start using OSM, you will find that you are going to google maps. Because it is simple so far ahead. Eventually OSM might catch up, maybe.

And if they start using OSM, you will find that you are going to google maps. Because it is simple so far ahead. Eventually OSM might catch up, maybe.

OSM is never going to catch up to Google Maps, because it's not trying to. GMaps is the Map plus a traffic layer plus a streetview layer + a pinning layer + etc. etc. OMS is just the map with the expectation that you'll roll your own on top of it. iPhoto's use of OMS is in no way inferior to using GMaps for the same purpose. All the extra stuff in GMaps is totally extraneous there. Ditto for Foursquare sitting on OMS. Who cares about the traffic layer that OMS doesn't have when you're just looking to check in?

What's going to happen isn't that OSM catches up to "Google Maps writ large", it's that OSM + iOS will catch up for mobile maps, OSM + wikipedia will catch up for geolocating public data, OSM + foursquare will outpace for check-ins, OSM + MS will maybe not catch up, but close the gap on geo search, etc.

The thing that's interesting to me is that so many months into the announcement of the acquisition and we still don't really know what Google's intentions are. One minute it's the patents they wanted from Motorola, another it's to build innovative hardware, but then Andy Rubin says there's a firewall between the 2 companies. Larry Page says he's looking to leverage the set top business in Google's favor, but then stories emerge that Google is looking to sell that aspect of Motorola (guess they've given up on GoogleTV?).

Thankfully we'll know if the patents they bought have any worth once these mobile legal battles go to actual court over the next 2-3 years.

This sounds pretty weak, imo. I see tons of those little robots around. I hear Andriod and "droid". It sounds an aweful lot like trying to diminish Android. Much like people tried to say that people didn't "pick" Windows. So if the iPhone is such a known thing--maybe people aren't picking Android, just knwo that they don't want an iPhone.

Many people didn't pick Windows, they picked the hardware and pricepoint that worked for them and got Windows in the bargain. The same could be true for Android. This doesn't diminish Android or Windows, it gives context to why people make their buying decisions and also helps us determine what value unit-share has on the overall health of a platform. As for your last point, that some people may simply be choosing the anti-Apple choice, there's no question that Apple has its share of detractors and there is probably a small but significant portion of the marketplace that is simply choosing to say 'no' to Apple, rather than saying 'yes' to a particular OEM or software platform like Samsung or Android.

Many people didn't pick Windows, they picked the hardware and pricepoint that worked for them and got Windows in the bargain.

That may have been true the first time someone picked out a personal computer, but after that, "switching" was about as commonplace as religious conversions (which is to say, it happens a lot less than folks think).

Also, once Microsoft became really dominant, then it wasn't so much "chosen" as "acceded to" in many cases. A lot of people looked at what they ran at work, the software selection at Frys or Best Buy, and the decision made itself. Later, as telecommuting, taking work home, and other such stuff became prominent there was even a more pronounced "Windows no matter what I think of it" effect. People argued over which Windows to run and (later) whether they could skip things like Millenium or Vista, but there wasn't that much argument about whether to go with Windows for far too many consumers. It's only in the last 4 or 5 years it has become a serious question and still not one for the vast majority even now.

Right now, no mobile vendor has Windows of dominance, but it seems clear enough from the remarkable failure of WP7, in particular, that the selection of Android by consumers isn't an accident. If it was about hardware, and Android was in some sense "free riding", then by sheer accident WP7 would be at 10 or 15 per cent.

The failure of WP7 is the clearest evidence that Android is being chosen with some degree of deliberateness.

This sounds pretty weak, imo. I see tons of those little robots around. I hear Andriod and "droid". It sounds an aweful lot like trying to diminish Android. Much like people tried to say that people didn't "pick" Windows. So if the iPhone is such a known thing--maybe people aren't picking Android, just knwo that they don't want an iPhone.

Many people didn't pick Windows, they picked the hardware and pricepoint that worked for them and got Windows in the bargain. The same could be true for Android. This doesn't diminish Android or Windows, it gives context to why people make their buying decisions and also helps us determine what value unit-share has on the overall health of a platform. As for your last point, that some people may simply be choosing the anti-Apple choice, there's no question that Apple has its share of detractors and there is probably a small but significant portion of the marketplace that is simply choosing to say 'no' to Apple, rather than saying 'yes' to a particular OEM or software platform like Samsung or Android.

Or maybe they are picking Android, and THEN pick the hardware they like. Naturally some don't know and just pick whatever. Just like some who pick iPhone just do it because it is "cool" or other reasons other than "iOS" or "iPhone". Some might pick it becuase it has a great camera regardless of OS. etc. etc.

Many people didn't pick Windows, they picked the hardware and pricepoint that worked for them and got Windows in the bargain.

That may have been true the first time someone picked out a personal computer, but after that, "switching" was about as commonplace as religious conversions (which is to say, it happens a lot less than folks think).

Also, once Microsoft became really dominant, then it wasn't so much "chosen" as "acceded to" in many cases. A lot of people looked at what they ran at work, the software selection at Frys or Best Buy, and the decision made itself. Later, as telecommuting, taking work home, and other such stuff became prominent there was even a more pronounced "Windows no matter what I think of it" effect. People argued over which Windows to run and (later) whether they could skip things like Millenium or Vista, but there wasn't that much argument about whether to go with Windows for far too many consumers. It's only in the last 4 or 5 years it has become a serious question and still not one for the vast majority even now.

I have no real argument with this assessment. Windows became quite sticky and hard to disengage from for a variety of reasons, many of which you listed above.

Quote:

Right now, no mobile vendor has Windows of dominance, but it seems clear enough from the remarkable failure of WP7, in particular, that the selection of Android by consumers isn't an accident. If it was about hardware, and Android was in some sense "free riding", then by sheer accident WP7 would be at 10 or 15 per cent.

The failure of WP7 is the clearest evidence that Android is being chosen with some degree of deliberateness.

And here we have to part ways. There is a significant effect here that you are neglecting: sales practices of the carriers. We have data that salespersons from the various carriers have pushed Android phones over Windows Phone 7...phones. There have also been a scant few handsets running WP7 that have been of a similar quality to the high-end Android devices and none have reached the pinnacle set by the S2, Galaxy Nexus or the Droid RAZR. WP7 handsets have relatively low-resolution screens, last-generation internals and, with the exception of the new Lumia series, have been spectacularly uninteresting from a design perspective.

It's tempting and easy to draw a straight line between poor WP7 sales and consumers actively picking Android but the reality is more muddled. There are also the chicken-and-egg problems of referrals from friends (because of the extremely small size of the WP7 install base) and the extremely poor software ecosystem compared to Android and iOS.

There is a significant effect here that you are neglecting: sales practices of the carriers. We have data that salespersons from the various carriers have pushed Android phones over Windows Phone 7...phones.

Once upon a staving summer, I tried to make my living selling something.

Let me tell you, the one thing anyone in sales wants is an easy sale. If someone came in and said, I want a WP7 phone, I guarantee you that if that consumer shows the slightest persistence in that preference, they are going to get it. And, that is going to get WP7 to more than the 1.5 or 1.9 per cent it now is.

If what you say is true, why are the carriers even stocking WP7 at all, anyway?

If it is just a matter of what the salesman push, as you now suggest, there would come a moment where they would be told to push WP7. If it is on the shelves, it is going to get its moment.

And, it isn't like there has been no ad campaign by MS at all.

I know a lot of people around here work very hard to ignore Android. It somehow, someway has to be discredited.

There's plenty of stuff on the shelves. Some consumers are coming in, Blackberries in hand, and somehow leaving the store with Android phones. It isn't all salesman stuff. People aren't that passive, especially those with an existing phone. And, sale folk in my experience push what everyone else is buying, even when there is some sort of 'spiff' on the dogs (and believe me, that's what MS' WP7 is called when they are in the back room talking product among themselves).

Something is happening and that something is Android.

I'm not sure why it is, but you'd have gone broke any time in 2011 by presuming that consumers don't want it and it is going to crash and burn "real soon now". We were treated to all kinds of arguments about why it couldn't be real, why there were millions of dissatisfied customers out there and even imaginative arguments as to how the consumer had no idea there was Android in the phone (except, of course, it is trivial to see it prominently mentioned all over the place).

Heck whole phone lines (e.g. DROID) were named after Android. But, someone actually tried to say that consumers had no idea that Droid and Android were one in the same.

If you persist on this path, you're going to find yourself saying stuff like this.

It may not have iPhone's brand awareness (I don't know if anything has that) but it seems pretty obviously to have enough to keep a prominent Microsoft product in handcuffs and sales disgrace for over a year.

A few aggressive salesmen really can't carry the argument you're trying to make. Not at such a pathetic showing.

Quote:

It's tempting and easy to draw a straight line between poor WP7 sales and consumers actively picking Android but the reality is more muddled. There are also the chicken-and-egg problems of referrals from friends (because of the extremely small size of the WP7 install base) and the extremely poor software ecosystem compared to Android and iOS.

WP7 has had a least a year.

And, you've just stepped on your own story. Referrals from friends most definitely count in Android's favor as does awareness of application ecosystem problems. That's pretty sophisticated brand awareness, in fact. So, it isn't all sales folk now by your own account. This isn't 1983 anymore. People "get" the idea that apps matter and it isn't hard to find out where that stands. Heck, the sales folk will clue you in -- you only have to ask.

I guess this thread's about mobile OS market-share, so that's the motivation. I'm interested to see how the mobile OS scene looks in 2015, now that we have tablet OS in the picture. Amazing that that unfolded entirely after this thread began.

concept for a 4" iphone 4.http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/9/293726 ... h-iphone-5not worthy of a battlefront topic since it lacks enough contention, so i thought i'd pop it here. Apple loyalists: this would minimally increase the size, and mostly in the less-relevant-to-pocketability vertical direction, provided apple cuts down the borders. It would also minimally increase the distance a thumb needs to travel. OTOH, this would give apple a true 4" screen and be minimally fragmented: by keeping the exact same PPI, an incompatible app would display in the same size screen as the old iphone, so you're not losing any size or PPI... and apps that use standard view APIs could simply show longer ListView fragments or basically show parts of the app not shown on a 960px long screen (e.g. for a settings list, less scrolling) to fill the vertical space. Video Apps could simply be updated to work with the new aspect ratio, since they already hand over the video to QuickTime anyway, they might not even need a modification in some cases. This seems like win-win to me. Same PPI, reasonable screen size, competitive and minimal fragmentation.

To Android fans like me: if the 2012 iPhone came out with this, LTE, Siri 1.0 (out of beta), and a 32nm (die-shrunk) A5 with 50% higher clocks for the CPU & GPU, would this impact the sales of android phones significantly positively or negatively?

To everyone: Is such a phone what Apple is "expected" to do? Is it the minimum, more of a wished-for-but-unlikely idea, or simply going in a completely different direction than where apple will actually take 2012 iPhone?

This is even worse. They fork it so they have something unique and can thus charge a premium for? You realize how idiotic that sounds, right? They can do that with their touchwiz or whatever it is called. But actually forking is a stupid-ass idea unless you make money from the services.

TouchWiz is literally skin deep. It doesn't create any significant barriers to switching away from Samsung's handsets, which means it won't do anything to prevent low-margin OEMs from driving Samsung's margins down.

And you do realize that you're basically calling the business model of the world's most valuable company "idiotic", yes?

Echohead2 wrote:

Notice that Amazon is doing it on plans to make money from the serivces--not sell their product at high profit margins. They would be behind the curve constantly. They take ICS and fork it. Great--until Jelly Bean comes out--now they have either take JB and apply their forks, or continue on with outdated Android. All the while, the rest of the Android world is steam rolling right past them. It is a recipe for disaster.

"The rest of the Android world" mostly seems fine with outdated Android. Yes, merging useful mainline Android changes into a fork would require some effort on Samsung's part -- but it's not likely it would amount to much money on a per-unit basis. In effect, Samsung might be able to do to Android what Celera famously did to the public human genome project -- they took all the open data, added their own efforts on top of it, and got there before the open project did.

Android is taking the low, middle and high end with it's product range in China. Why would any Chinese consumer settle for an iphone, when they can choose 720p screened devices like the Moto XT928 with dual mode (GSM+CDMA), dual standby etc? I guess the ones that care about the branding more than actual technical functionality. Will Apple ever deliver a dual SIM device? They will be relegated to a true niche status in many countries if they don't.

lol dual sim

Specs Matter.

Dual SIM capability is critical for developing markets like India and China, keep living in lala Apple land boys. Remember the golden rule, if Apple doesn't cater to the market, that market can be ignored and handwaved away. Specs only matter when magical words like "Retina", "5x faster", "supercomputer" etc are involved.

"The survery showing Nokia top dual-SIM phone maker comes months after a report revealed Nokia was making a comeback in the low-end phone segment. According to the media research, multi-SIM shipments accounted 54 per cent of the total handsets market during November 2011 in the country. Nokia led the race with 19 per cent market share, followed by Micromax (7.1 per cent) and Karbonn (6.9 per cent).

I read that, and it is quite a good idea, but it is also a bodge. Apple did not put enough thought into handling different screens in the future, and it has limited their flexibility. Android does a good job of dealing with different screen sizes, ratios, resolutions and so on; it is a little complicated at first, but all the necessary methods and tools are there to build UIs that adapt gracefully.

I read that, and it is quite a good idea, but it is also a bodge. Apple did not put enough thought into handling different screens in the future, and it has limited their flexibility. Android does a good job of dealing with different screen sizes, ratios, resolutions and so on; it is a little complicated at first, but all the necessary methods and tools are there to build UIs that adapt gracefully.

And yet Android apps, in general, have rubbish UI's. Especially compared to their iOS or WP7 counterparts.

I think that Verge article is missing a more obvious solution - add some extra pixels on the bottom and you can now do away completely with a home button, and replace it with soft buttons like the Galaxy Nexus uses. It's been rumoured for quite some time that Apple was looking to do just that.

Android will be dominant by 2015 but in an even more disparate form than currently exists. OEMs will increasingly do an Amazon and just create their own Android based OS.It's pretty much what they're doing now anyway by selling phones with 2.3 and inalterable skins like TouchWiz.

The fact that most phones sold will run some underlying version of Android will be enough for snobbish geeks owning the minority of Android phones actually running the latest version unaltered to assert themselves of their decision and the sheep mentality of iPhone owners.

Android tablets have mostly been pretty crappy so far. You have higher end ones that cost almost as much as iPads but have worse experience overall (Honeycomb+Tegra2 is pretty shitty) and significantly cheaper ones with really crap hardware. The biggest exception is the Fire, which is cheap with not-too-bad hardware, but there's of course endless debate about how much that should count as an Android tablet.

This is not the case with phones. There, the expensive Android are broadly competitive with iPhones, while cheaper ones might be a bit crappy but are still beat the pants of the Symbians and featurephones that they replaced.

I know a lot of people around here work very hard to ignore Android. It somehow, someway has to be discredited.

I'm coining a term for it: android derangement syndrome.

Whatever else I think of Android (not a lot, to be honest) it's better than Symbian, so we should be grateful at least that it's put that out of its misery.

It's just that, I don't see that Apple has much to fear from Android, and clearly neither does Apple. That could be catastrophic complacency coming before a fall, certainly. I don't think it is, but time will tell.

Nokia and Microsoft most certainly do have everything to fear from Android.

I know a lot of people around here work very hard to ignore Android. It somehow, someway has to be discredited.

I'm coining a term for it: android derangement syndrome.

Whatever else I think of Android (not a lot, to be honest) it's better than Symbian, so we should be grateful at least that it's put that out of its misery.

It's just that, I don't see that Apple has much to fear from Android, and clearly neither does Apple. That could be catastrophic complacency coming before a fall, certainly. I don't think it is, but time will tell.

Nokia and Microsoft most certainly do have everything to fear from Android.

Precisely.

Though it's quite sobering that if Nokia fails, we're heading for a two mobile OS future. I haven't decided yet whether that's a good or bad thing. Certainly in desktop computing it can be argued it was a good thing to have one dominant player until the dust had settled. So perhaps having two mobile OS platforms isn't a terrible thing.

Android is taking the low, middle and high end with it's product range in China. Why would any Chinese consumer settle for an iphone, when they can choose 720p screened devices like the Moto XT928 with dual mode (GSM+CDMA), dual standby etc? I guess the ones that care about the branding more than actual technical functionality. Will Apple ever deliver a dual SIM device? They will be relegated to a true niche status in many countries if they don't.

lol dual sim

Specs Matter.

Dual SIM capability is critical for developing markets like India and China, keep living in lala Apple land boys. Remember the golden rule, if Apple doesn't cater to the market, that market can be ignored and handwaved away. Specs only matter when magical words like "Retina", "5x faster", "supercomputer" etc are involved.

"The survery showing Nokia top dual-SIM phone maker comes months after a report revealed Nokia was making a comeback in the low-end phone segment. According to the media research, multi-SIM shipments accounted 54 per cent of the total handsets market during November 2011 in the country. Nokia led the race with 19 per cent market share, followed by Micromax (7.1 per cent) and Karbonn (6.9 per cent).

Changed your bold for India. As for China. Let me know when there are riots for an Android phone and we'll talk about consumer preference and Apple not adequately addressing that market.

There is no value proposition with Android tablets. OEMs are trying to make a products that are similar to the iPad in functionality, which they have succeeded with, but there isnt an ecosystem present to take advantage of the hardware. The app situation is abysmal, and for whatever reason Android users don't acquire non-app content from the Market; Google Music has done very poorly, and reports have claimed that the movie sales initiative isn't going much better.

Another problem is marketing, as no one has the branding clout save for Samsung. But Samsung's problem is the same as other OEMs; they're reliant on Google's unsuccessful non-app ecosystem.

Basically people don't seem to look to Google to acquire content, and content is the entire point of these devices, as Apple and Amazon's rich ecosystems have proven. Google can still find success, but they need to get their house in order with regards to their Market, advertising it and garnering significant mindshare, and they need to convince users to give Google their credit card info. I feel this can be achieved by mandating Google's payment systems as the only one allowed on the Market, which if I'm not mistaken they are already doing.

I'll buy that, but if the ecosystem *is* Android, and that ecosystem is not selling tablets, why are phones selling well while tablets are the doing disproportionately terrible?

I gotta say it's pretty apparent that devices are not being sold on the Android brand name. Proof positive is the Kindle Fire being the best selling "Android" tablet does use Android in its marketing other than a reference to the "Amazon App Store for Android" which at this point they can probably drop the "for Android" part and not see a nick in sales.

First off, Android phone apps are miles better than their tablet counterparts. This also comes back again to the Market; as I understand it they didnt have a dedicated tablet section there for months. Is that still the case now?

Also, phones have the full force of carriers, which is no small benefit. Carrier market these devices in print, television and radio, and also push them when customers physically enter the store. What equivalent of this is present for tablets? Some Best Buy stores will have an interactive display present, but they aren't going to do this for many devices, as floor space comes at a premium. This is a significant point of presence for Android OEMs as none of them have their own stores like Apple does, so having a foothold in these electronic stores is key... and they don't have it. Carriers aren't helpful for tablets as customers clearly recoil at being tied to a contract for these devices.

Finally, phones have an inherent value by virtue of being phones; even if you don't buy a single app or any other content, you make calls and sent texts to the people in your life. We're at a point where cell phones are more or less a necessity in first world countries. A tablet, and this includes the iPad, is a luxury item; there needs to be a very clear value apparent to customers. That value is provided by Amazon and Apple through their rich content ecosystems. Google does not have this value to leverage to customers, and I feel that's why they repel Android tablets.

In phones, that content ecosystem isn't as necessary because a phone has inherent value, and Android phones have significant mindshare and marketing muscle behind them, from OEMs, carriers, and electronic outlets.

In phones, that content ecosystem isn't as necessary because a phone has inherent value, and Android phones have significant mindshare and marketing muscle behind them, from OEMs, carriers, and electronic outlets.

So do you think if the tablet ecosystem improves Android tablets will sell as well or better than the competition?